Podcast appearances and mentions of simon they

 Know more on how to turn your product or service’s complexity to simplicity without losing its value Recognize the value of expressing and marketing your product in the simplest way rather than making it complex Learn how to convey and show your product or service’s value using Simon’s Model Method Resources/Links: Check out Simon’s Website: http://www.modelsmethod.com Summary Does it feel difficult for you to market your product? Are you able to connect with your client’s needs through your product? Simon Bowen is the founder of The Models Method and creator of The Genius Model. Simon's forte is using visual models to simplify what would otherwise perhaps be a complex value proposition and elevate your influence in doing so. In this episode, Simon talks about the importance of really expressing your product or services in the simplest way possible rather than making everything complex. He shares his insights on the value of expressing your product or services with the help of his own website, Models Method. Check out these episode highlights: 1:39 - Simon’s ideal client: “Companies that are selling a complex product or service to a complex customer. The complex customer is someone who doesn't really, they're not really clear, not necessarily about what they want, but they're not clear about what's available to actually solve that for them.” 3:13 - Problem Simon helps solve: “The problem is, most businesses don't put anywhere near enough effort to understand how to express the profound and hidden value of their product and service in a simple way.” 4:19 - Typical symptoms that clients do before reaching out to Simon: “They'll be feeling like they're getting, they're having to charge a lower price than they believe the product is worth. And probably what's fueling that is they sell their product to the client at a price the client loves the product, and they say, "This is worth way more than what you're charging for it." That should be a red flag for everybody.” 6:02 - Common mistakes that people make before they find Simon’s solution: “The biggest problem or the biggest cause of problems is people in sales are failing to understand that every sale is an insurance policy. So, a customer comes to you to see if you can help them out of interest-based on the situation they're experiencing.” 7:33 - Simon’s Valuable Free Resource (VFR): Check out Simon’s website: http://www.modelsmethod.com 8:00 - Q: Hey, Simon, if I gave you more time than seven minutes, could you draw me some models? A: Hell yes! Tweetable Takeaways from this Episode: “All value is determined by your ability to express it.” -Simon BowenClick To Tweet Transcript (Note, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast) Tom Poland 0:09 Greetings everyone, and a very warm welcome to another edition of Marketing The Invisible. My name is Tom Poland, joined today by Simon Bowen. Simon, a very warm good day, sir. Welcome, and where you're hanging out? Simon Bowen 0:20 Yes, I'm in Perth, West Coast of Australia. Beautiful place. Tom Poland 0:24 On the other side of the big country down under. And I'm on, for those of you who don't know location-wise, I'm on the East Coast, so hands across the land. Tom Poland 0:33 Simon is, in my humble opinion, a frickin genius so it's appropriate that he's also the founder of The Models Method and creator of The Genius Model. And if you don't know this, get your digital butt over to www.modelsmethod.com because you're in for a revelation. Simon's forte, if you like, is using visual models to simplify what would otherwise perhaps be a complex value proposition and elevate your influence in doing so. Tom Poland 1:09 Now, his particular methodology has literally genera...

  I had the distinct privilege to sit down with Simon T Bailey to discuss his timeless book, "Shift Your Brilliance". I met Simon in March of 2020 when he gave a keynote address at a conference I was attending and his infectious manner and positive energy, drew me in. I had to interview him and find out more about this man. In this interview, we explore his book "Shift Your Brilliance" because it is so incredibly timely with what's happening in the world today with COVID-19, so many people furloughed from their jobs and so many companies going under with the weight of an almost non-existent economy due to social distancing. I hope this interview provides some real life guidance to those of you who may be a little lost at the moment and not sure what you next move might be. If you can shift your brilliance in a new direction, you'll surely come out on top when the dust settles. Enjoy! Simon T Bailey: Simon's Website: Simon T Bailey Connect with Simon: LinkedIn Personal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simontbailey/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BrilliantSimonT/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/simontbailey Twitter: https://twitter.com/SimonTBailey Simon's Books: "Shift Your Brilliance" "Release Your Brilliance" "Be the Spark: Five Platinum Service Principles for Creating Customers for Life" "Brilliant Living: 31 Insights to Creating an Awesome Life" "Success is an Inside Job: Brilliant Service is the Bottom Line" "Releasing Leadership Brilliance: Breaking Sound Barriers in Education" "The Vuja de Moment: Shift from Average to Brilliant" "Simon Says Dream: Live a Passionate Life" Podcast Music By: Andy Galore, Album: "Out and About", Song: "Chicken & Scotch" 2014 Andy's Links: http://andygalore.com/ https://www.facebook.com/andygalorebass If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. For show notes and past guests, please visit: https://joecostelloglobal.com/#thejoecostelloshow Subscribe, Rate & Review: I would love if you could subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest rating & review. This will encourage other people to listen and allow us to grow as a community. The bigger we get as a community, the bigger the impact we can have on the world. Sign up for Joe's email newsletter at: https://joecostelloglobal.com/#signup For transcripts of episodes, go to: https://joecostelloglobal.com/#thejoecostelloshow Follow Joe: Twitter: https://twitter.com/jcostelloglobal Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jcostelloglobal/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jcostelloglobal/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUZsrJsf8-1dS6ddAa9Sr1Q?view_as=subscriber Transcript Joe: Welcome, everybody. I'm really excited today to have Simon T. Bailey on the show, Simon and I met in March of this past year, but it was very briefly was passing in the hallway at a conference in Colorado. I shook his hand, told him how I loved the talk that he had just given the group. And then I was lucky enough to get him to say yes to come on to my podcast. So, Simon, welcome to my podcast. Thank you so much. Simon: Hey, Joe, good to be with you. Thank you for having me. Joe: Yeah, so I have one question before we even start, Simon: Sure. Joe: Why Simon T. Bailey? Simon: Because the "T is for terrific, you walked  into Joe: I Simon: It Joe: Said, Simon:  there, Joe: Damn, I should have guessed, I should have guessed. Simon: Though, the T is is a family name that my father gave to me. It stands for Theopolis, which is great. So Joe: Wow, OK, I was just wondering. Simon: It's a branding thing as well. Joe: So we are definitely going to talk today about your very timely book, which was published in 2014 called Shift Your Brilliance, Harness The Power of You Inc. Super interesting. I'm an audio book guy, so I listen to the audio book part, which for me is even better because I love your voice. Your laugh is probably the most infectious laugh that I've heard in such a long time. So that was great for me. But before we get into it, I just kind of want to lay a little groundwork about who Simon T. Bailey is. I know that from the book and from your talk that you gave out in Colorado, and I know you speak all over the world, that you came from the corporate environment. So you can start as far back as you want. I know the book covers some of your childhood, so it's completely up to you how far back you want to go. But I want to just lay a little groundwork so they know who you are and then we can get into all the other stuff. Simon: All , so give us two in a minute and a half or less, because it's important to what I'll share today, 14 years of age, mom and dad took me to Bennett High School or McKinley High School in Buffalo, New York, where I grew up, went out for football, basketball, got cut, went out for track and field. They said you're too slow that summer, attempted to commit suicide, didn't go through with it. Sophomore year, brand new high school teacher says to me, write a speech for the entire school. Absolutely changed my life. Ended up being class president. I moved to Atlanta, Georgia, dropped out of college after my first year, went back to college, took me ten years to finish my undergrad degree, started at a decent hotel making five dollars and ten cents an hour as a front desk clerk. That was about 30 years ago, fast forwarding got hired at Disney after a ten interviews over a ten year period. I stayed at Disney for seven years, left Disney after turning down for job same and a job saying that I wanted to be or I did an interview saying I wanted to become the number one guy at Disney that was put in front of that didn't quite work out. So I thought it probably best for me to find my happiness elsewhere. After Joe: But. Simon: Being married for twenty five years, went through a divorce and a video was posted to Facebook about me telling that story. That video has over 90 million views to date. And then from there I went through a bout of cancer. I am a cancer survivor, thank goodness. I have two amazing children. Twenty one year old son, eighteen year old daughter. And today I've worked with almost eighteen hundred organizations in forty nine countries just teaching a very simple concept that you have to shift your brilliance in the midst of uncertainty. I've written ten books, I've worked in forty nine countries and three of my courses are linked and learning. So that's just it in a nutshell. Joe: Man, oh, man, I'm tired just hearing that's amazing, that's truly amazing. And there's some of those things, obviously I didn't even know so and what I love about you besides the talk that you gave and how infectious you are and and it's and I even said it the other night, we were having a conversation and how I was having you on as a guest is that you're you're so positive. And it's it's and you you smile all the time, like every Instagram post, everything. It's just it's part of who you've become. And I think when I when I listen to the audio book and I heard you talk, I feel like you were the person at Disney that you've you're now trying to get at least the business people. Not like there's regular people that I know that this book and what you talk about attracts. But you were that person at Disney where it was just heads down working. And I think you even talked about a sport where you didn't even know the people that were part of your team or you didn't like you talked about getting reviews or something to that, where they just said if you actually knew the people you were working with and they knew you as a person, it would shift things for you. Simon: Totally, totally, I was so busy trying to climb the ladder of perceived success, in the words of Dr. Stephen Covey, only discovered my ladder was against the long haul. So I was the boss with an agenda instead of a leader with a vision. Joe: Yeah, it's it's really amazing. Well, I appreciate you giving us the background, I think now the people that are listening to this, they're in for a real treat. So I can let you just take take it from here and then I'm going to try to sneak in some of these things that I want to sneak in. But I really want you to get into the fact that you wrote this book in twenty fourteen. And literally it's almost as if you you could have written it in the beginning of March knowing that covid-19 was coming, because when I listen to it, it's, it's literally that, that everyone needs to be poked and say this is the time to do this, this is the time to shift your brilliance and figure out what it is. I keep preaching. No one's coming to rescue us. We've got to do this Simon: That's Joe: On our own. Simon: That's totally yeah, so when I when I wrote the book and it's so appropriate for now, I was holding on to the way things had always been going for me as my business. When I left Disney, I started speaking Friday in training consulting and I was thinking that's the way it was always going to but as you can imagine my entire world has been disrupted as as everyone else. And what I recognize is sometimes we have to let go of what is comfortable and convenient in order to embrace what wants to emerge. So everyone  now is experiencing what many will call V.U.C.A., volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. So you have 40 million people that have been laid off. You have millions who have been furloughed. You have companies that have gone under. But also in the midst of that, there are some companies that are totally shifted what they have been doing and moving into a whole other direction. I was interviewing a company out of Baltimore and they are whiskey company, but guess what business they are in now, hand sanitizer, because they understand there's an opportunity to shift. So everyone is listening to us, has to begin to say, what about my career or my business? I could be doing this now for 18, almost 18 years since I left Disney. And I have to tell you, Joe, I have reinvented I'm on my fifth reinvention in 18 years because I have to shift. So I wrote that book from a deep place with this is one concept, and that is we have to implement vu ja de If deja vu has been there, done that, that's pre covid budget day is going. They're doing that. It's seeing the old and the new. The new and the old. Joe: Yeah, it's just really incredible, it's literally like the book was, I don't know how it did when it came out in 2014, I'm sure it did great because I was just so captured listening to the stories that you told in it. But, man, it's just like it was written for now. It's just unbelievable. Is it OK if I ask a couple of questions about it? OK, Simon: Absolutely! Joe: So there's a line in there that you talk about where you say we are spirit beings having a human experience. And I heard that and I was like, wow. So could you elaborate more on that? Simon: Yeah, so when I first started out years ago, I was invited to an event where Dr. Stephen Covey, the late, great Dr. Stephen Covey, author of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, was the opening speaker, Libby Sartain, who at that time was the chief people officer for Yahoo! And I was the closing speaker. And I just wanted to sit in and hear Dr. Covey because I was so fascinated. And he made this statement, which was originally, I think, quote by Wayne Dyer, and he said, We are not human beings having a spiritual experience where spirit beings having a human experience. And when I heard a joke, it was like a joy bomb, like BOOM!. I was like, what's that? And what I begin to recognize is all of us, we have a spirit. But how we show up into an environment, we either are hugging people with our words or we're tearing people down with our words and and words impact our spirit because words carry energy. And so we are spirit beings having a human experience. I believe what we're going through  now is everybody is being spiritually reset. Whatever spirituality means to everyone, they are thinking about meaning, not just money. Yes, money's important, but they're thinking about is my life really meaningful to thinking about power, not just or they're thinking about purpose, not just power, but that I think the other part of the spiritual reset that's happened is that people are also thinking about moving from success to significance. And that's so important when you're on the spiritual journey. Joe: And then there was another line in there, and again, I remember now that you brought it to my attention that Stephen Covey had said that and you had heard it in that that event. But hearing it from you gave it a different meaning when I listen to the audio book. So I had to bring it up because it was just like, man, I got to remember that and just keep that in the forefront of my mind. But then there was another one which was live from the inside out. Simon: Mm hmm, yet when you look from the inside out, you break the cycle of fear and worry because see what happens is  now uncertainty and worry has driven up stress and anxiety. And when a person is stressed out and they are living in fear and worry, it actually slows down the human operating system. So when you live from the inside out, what you're saying is, I'm not going to allow the outside circumstances to dictate how I what I produce, how I show up, how I thrive or survive. I'm going to take control of the steering wheel of my life and drive into the future and not be driven by all the news around me that's living from the inside out now. Yes, we need to be informed. Yes, we need to be well read. Yes, we need to pay attention to significant notifications that hit our phones. When you live from the inside out, what you realize is life is not a remote control. You can change the channel on your tell-a-vision. So when I live from the inside out, I am literally forecasting my future instead of living in the predictions of the day. Joe: When we talk about the book, but what's the audience that really needs something like this? Simon: Yes, so the book is written to that person who say twenty five to fifty five and they have either been furloughed or they're back at work, they're waiting for the other shoe to drop because now there's massive pressure to do to do more with less and working now might be working remote. So they're having to deal with the new world. But it's also written to that entrepreneur who says, I've done X, now I need to do Y and Z. How do I begin to harness the power of what we've done to be relevant for where things are going? It might be that solopreneur or that person who said, you know what I'm thinking about this is the time to go for it. And literally, I give you the tips and techniques on how to shift your brilliance, because it's my exact story when I left is the question. My entire for one with significant housing stock took out a line of credit on the house. So when I wrote "Shift Your Brilliance", I was probably already 10 years into my business. But I was thinking what had made me successful ten years in 10 years would make me successful in another 10 years. And I was wrong. Joe: Again, I keep thinking that people just think the Calvary's coming, you know, Simon: Oh, no, no. Joe: It's. Simon: Listen, every industry that literally can be turned upside down is being turned upside down. When you hear about retail like Brooks Brothers, Neiman Marcus filing for bankruptcy, J.C. Penney. These are these are brands that you thought would be around forever. And they are they're just going to look different, Joe: Yeah, Simon: ? Joe: Yeah, and by the way, you would know Neiman Marcus because I've seen you dress, so I know that Simon: Good. Joe: I know they love they love seeing you walk in the door because I've seen sharp and really sharp. It's funny because I met you there because I own management booking agency here in Phoenix and Scottsdale, Arizona. And then we expanded into Colorado last summer. I spent six weeks there developing all these relationships to take what I've done here with success and move it out there. So I'm in the same boat as you. There was nothing going on. I'm just starting to put some entertainment back in the resorts. But when I work with these destination management companies who you know well through the corporate world, who books entertainment to the level of someone like you, they're starting to come to me going, OK, what are the virtual options? And so have you been doing some virtual speaking? Simon: I've done about 25 virtual events in the last 100 days, Joe: Wow, that's Simon: And Joe: Amazing. Simon: It is it has been just a rewarding experience and now I've told the team, hey, let's get it down. I can do two to three a day, you know, Joe: Yeah, Simon: Let's go. Joe: Yeah, Simon: Yeah, let's go. Joe: And where are you doing them from? Are you doing  where you are now or. Simon: Really  that  now and every now and then, I will put up, depending on the setting, I will, you know, just change my screen there and . Joe: Exactly, exactly. Simon: This is the world we live in. And, yeah, it's been a great experience. I really love this virtual setting and I can't wait for life to come back, but I'm totally fine with doing the hybrid. Joe: Yeah, I was just wondering, because I know that's how we met, so I was wondering how you're faring through all of this and how many times you've done the whole virtual the virtual experience. So and and while we're talking about live, when you did give that talk, I noticed that you very rarely stood on the stage. And I don't know how do you know the number of people that were there were like 15 or 18 or twenty five hundred. Simon: They were expecting to lose about twelve hundred. Joe: Twelve hundred, OK, so for me and someday I aspire to maybe public speaking, so we'll see if that happens, but that's why for me, it was so interesting to watch you and you were on the floor most of the time. And so why do you when do you choose to do something like that? Simon: So, so many times everybody is looking at the stage, the stage on stage, and what I really believe people really want is a connection. And can you imagine that was probably the last presentation that I've given with that amount of people where there was no physical distance yet we had even heard of social distancing. Joe: . Simon: . So what I like to do is I like to have a conversation with people. So me coming off stage allows me to be almost like a jazz artist in the moment. I can reflect. I know where we need to go. I'm going to I'm going to stay on time. But I also get to do things on the fly in the moment. And it can only happen if I'm looking face to face with the human being. Joe: Yeah, I thought it was really different because there were so many people there and I was close enough to the front and towards an aisle, so I was happy. But I think some of those people in the back might be like, I can't really tell what he's doing or where he is, Simon: Which Joe: But. Simon: Is why they've got the IMAX, so Joe: Yeah, Simon: I knew they had and they had the cameras and Joe: Yeah, Simon: They would project me on the screen Joe: Yeah. Simon: And good on the video as well, because on a video, if I'm only on stage, you don't see the audience. So for your purposes to come off the stage, you see the audience. It is spontaneous and it's in the moment. Joe: Yeah, it was great, I was captivated the entire time. I love listening to you talk, conscious mind versus unconscious mind, that also hit me when I was listening to the audio book. And I understand it because I work on at least my own. I try to do meditation when I can remember to. It's tough. I was in a really good routine at one point and I slipped a little bit. At least I'm doing yoga almost three times a week. So it's Simon: Very. Joe: It's at least a little bit of a balance. But can you go into that a little bit more? Simon: Yeah, so one of the things I really believe is, as you know, in the unconscious mind, we just do things automatically, like if you get in, you drive in your car, you're going to go the way you always go. It's just unconscious. But when you become conscious, you're paying attention to what am I thinking? Thoughts, what am I saying? Words, and then what is the habit or behavior that I'm doing? And then what? It's that slight adjustment that I need to course correct in order to get better. So I'll give you a prime example. I've been working on losing weight and this has just been an ongoing battle for 20 years. So I decided during this COVID-19 time that my health coach sent me a Fitbit. So I got the Fitbit and it's monitoring my walk. So I go on a walk every morning. I get in at least seven to eight thousand steps within forty five minutes. But then I come. I came back home and I started doing push ups. Just ten push ups and sit ups will now up to 40. Now, I don't say that to be braggadocios or anything, but here's the deal. When I became conscious that I really want to lose weight, I start I stop focusing on losing the weight and focused on a healthy lifestyle, some conscious of that. I work out that I sleep. Did I drink my water? I got my water here. Did I actually take my vitamins? How am I eating better? So it's becoming conscious to say there's something I have to do every single day to move towards where I'm going. And I'm happy to say that I lost ten pounds over the last six weeks, but I have a good 10 to 15 to go and I'm excited about it because it's a conscious, healthy lifestyle instead of I have to lose weight because now the emphasis is on losing instead of maintaining and being healthy. Joe: No, well, that's great, congratulations, And see, and that's what I like about your post and when I watch your videos and is that you take things that so many of these people have been hearing for years and years, but there's a way that you word things and you shift things in your speech or you change the way someone thinks about something. And it's sometimes just that shift alone helps people to then understand it better and say, I can do that. And it's Simon: This. Joe: It was it's literally doing the same thing, as was mentioned five hundred other times, but it's the way it was said or the way it was presented. And that's what's cool about you. That is. Yeah. Another thing that popped out and stop me at any time where you want to dig in deeper to anything in the book. These are all the things that just jumped out at me. So information to revelation, that's a strong phrase. Simon: Yeah, so what I have discovered over many decades of studying, researching and really being mentored by very, very wise men and women, is that information is knowledge. OK, but then the next level below information is understanding, which is comprehension. So, for example, when I go to get my driver's license, I have read everything that I need to know to get the license. That's information. That's knowledge. But it's the understanding that if I don't stop at the stop sign and a cop sees me, I'm going to be pulled over and given a ticket because I ran through a stop sign. So now I have understanding to stop at the stop sign, to stop at the red light. It's not just information, but then the next level down is revelation and revelation is application. So car example, if I'm in my car driving, as my dad used to tell me, you have to drive for the car in front of you and the car behind you. I grew up in Buffalo, New York. So dealing with snow all the time. You know, if you're driving, you don't want to pay attention to the snow bag because somehow the car is going to veer over. So. So you have a revelation that I want to look straight ahead. Simon: I don't want to end up over there, but it's it's like that causes you to drive straight ahead and avoid an accident. So when I talk about my information revelation, it's really understanding that sometimes we can have information that is a mile wide but only an inch deep. And when I moved to revelation, I have the ability to go three to four levels down in in whatever I'm working on. So when we look through this COVID-19 time. All , let's just look at it from a revelation standpoint. So the first is PTSD is going to be at an all time high because there's fear, stress and worry on the planet. . We also understand that that the magnetic fields, climate change, everything is just being turned upside down. We also then recognize that industries are collapsing and being reinvented. The fourth level is we also realize that during this time that corporations see this as an opportunity to furlough and to lay people off and never bring them back, because we are in a world of automation, algorithms, artificial intelligence like never before. But the fifth level, which is so I think even more powerful, we also see the companies that have cash who have been sitting on the sidelines waiting. Simon: They're going to poach and buy up companies. So if you remember, just a few years ago, Apple had over one hundred and seventy billion dollars in an offshore account. And due to the Patriot Act, they could bring it back and not have to pay as much. But when you have that much cash, you could go and buy companies. Warren Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha, they have over a hundred billion dollars of cash sitting and waiting. So when everyone is running scared and worried as as a good friend of mine, a hedge fund investor, he said, Simon, the money is made in the dip. You don't make the money at the top of the mountain. You make it when everybody is running scared. So when you think about revelation, it's going five levels deep, saying, what do you see that others don't see? What what are you noticing? What's the budget day? Because we will hear of companies that will literally come through this that time. And we're like, where do they come from? Because they decided to play another game. They shifted their brilliance and what the opposite direction. So everyone was zigging. They were zagging. Joe: Yes, so let me ask you this, when you wrote this in 2014, what sparked it? Like I can see you writing it now, like I can see you writing it on March 15th going well. I need to write this because we're in some deep stuff  now. So if I really put my head down and I can get this done in 30, and that's another thing I'd love to do some days, write a book. But if you put your head down, you could have maybe finished it by April 15th and now it would be out. But it makes total sense now. And that's why when I listen to it, I was like, gosh, this is like he he knew it was coming. It's like, well, what made you write it in twenty fourteen. Simon: My business had dried up. I was holding on by a thread Joe: And what was Simon: Business Joe: That just Simon: Wise, and Joe: Was that Simon: Yes, Joe: Speaking and Simon: I was Joe: Coaching? Simon: I was I wasn't getting the bookings at the feed that I needed, because when I quit my job, my wife, my then wife didn't work outside the home. So everything was on me. And we had young kids, mortgage, private school, the whole nine yards. So the business wasn't coming in and and the book sales weren't moving. We had a consultant project that had come to an end that had kind of given me a buffer. And so literally it was dry as toast business wise. And I said, you know what, I got to shift what I'm doing. I've got to think differently. And that's when I began to realize I'm not in the business. I'm in the content media distribution business. And the money is in content. That's what I remember at Disney. So I recognize if I didn't shift my my brilliance and reinvent and let go of what had been working and move into another direction, I probably wouldn't be here today talking to you. So what I realize is I can always do the speaking. But then I started adding coaching. I started adding training, I started doing online learning. And that's when I got connected with the folks over at then it was Lynda.com was called LinkedIn Learning Now and they said, you need to put your course into micro content. I was like, what's micro content? And there they're like three to five minutes of the snippet where you don't give it all away, but you chuck it down and people can access it. Twenty four, seven, three sixty five. Joe I had never heard of it. I was like what? I've always delivered on stage. But now all of a sudden a new opportunity came out of nowhere. And it's kind of like when Netflix had an opportunity to be purchased by Blockbuster and Blockbuster didn't see it will look more. Netflix is now and Blockbuster. ? So I had five when I wrote the book. Do I want to be Netflix or do I want to be Blockbuster? Joe: Wow, and did you is it basically the book, did it come as you were making this transition yourself? Were you take would you take everything that you sort of did and put it into the book as you were physically working on yourself and mentally and emotionally and whatever your transformation is, basically this book during 2014. Simon: So you ask a very important question, what a lot of people know, the book that came out in twenty fourteen was actually a book that I had written back in 2008 during the financial meltdown, Joe: Wow. Simon: And it was a different title. So the book has gone through three title changes and twenty five rewrites over almost two to three year period because I had to live through the shift. So the reason some of the words pop off the page from a just an energetic standpoint, because I wrote it from a deep place I was living, I was in the thick of it, so I was phoning it in. It was literally my life. I had to change the title because when I went to a publisher there, "Vuja de Moment", that's, you know, that's like esoteric. What the great  for the average person could understand Joe: . Simon: It. So what if we do this together? Like, no, Shift Your Brilliance. And I said, OK, that's what I'm living. But I had to live through it in order to write about it. Joe: Yeah, that's incredible. It's and you could tell and I really hope a lot of the listeners and viewers of the YouTube channel will go in and get the book because I'm doing it like obviously I have no choice. So it's so funny. I'm a musician at heart. I actually went to school out at Fredonia. Out where? Simon: Oh. Joe: Yeah. And and I played a lot in Buffalo. I played at the Lafayette Taproom. I don't know if that was there when you were there. I don't know. Simon: We Joe: Yeah. Simon: Got a good. Joe: Yeah, I got a I got a buddy that lives in Williamsville. Yeah. So when I found out you lived in Buffalo, I think man, when I picked that school to go to college and I was waking up at eight o'clock in the morning to go to theory and walking through four feet of snow, I was like, what were you thinking? Simon: Wow. Joe: Gone to Miami or somewhere. Oh, this is a great phrase. Broadband results on a dial up network. I love that. I heard that. I was like, gosh, I got to make signs of all of these things and just put them around my office. Simon: You have to evaluate how often are we upgrading what we're doing and here why this is why this is important for everyone listening to us from the time Apple releases the iPhone. OK, over many years, . The iPhone had 18 upgrades from two thousand seven to twenty nineteen eighteen upgrades. Every upgrade of the iPhone, a camera was better. More storage on and on. But what's interesting, if you look at that over 12 years, 12 times, 12, 12 years, 12 months is one forty four, one forty four divided by 18 upgrades simply means every eight months Apple was upgrading what they were doing because if they didn't, everybody else out of the market would catch up. So when I made the statement, we sometimes want broadband results by using dial up methods. It's the challenge that if I'm not upgrading my mindset, my skill set, my will set, then there's somebody else that's catching up when I'm asleep. Joe: People should make that sign and just put it somewhere, especially during this time  now, you know what I mean? Just trying to get the word out to say this is this is like of we've been given. What did I say? I said something about where you thought you had a deadline March 1st for some assignment a teacher gave you and the biggest gift and you totally hadn't done a thing. And the biggest gift that you got was the teacher gave you six months to get it done. And I Simon: That's. Joe: Feel like this period of time, I don't know if this will ever happen again in history. Like I went through 9/11 with an office in New York, like I owned the company. I was on 38th Street and Broadway. Everything shut down just like this. And now obviously we got hit a lot harder than the rest of the country because New York just stopped. The rest of the world, paused for a moment and then started to pick back up. New York just stopped. So I've gone through that. And then, like you said, we've gone through the 2008 crisis and then now this. And when each time these things happen, I was less stressed because I I knew that I would just figure out a way and shift and change and pivot and move on. So I never even though I my company was just slamming up and told when we were out in in Colorado every couple of days, I'd get a phone call from another client because I book a lot of resort entertainment here and it would come in little dribs and drabs and say, hey, I think we're going to have to cancel the music. Things are starting to get a little weird here. And I'm thinking, OK, and then it just hit. And then everyone call like within four days and said we're I need everything canceled until further notice. I was like, oh my God, now. And but I never stressed about it because I knew I was going to pivot and do something different. And I was able to finally start my podcast, which I had put down on a piece of paper. And I think in twenty fifteen. So here we are, twenty twenty. And I finally have the opportunity to get it . Simon: That's so that hey, that's so good. Same thing with me. We had over six figures worth of business disappeared seven days Joe: And. Simon: That night and some of it canceled, some of it moved to next Joe: Mm Simon: Year. Joe: Hmm. Simon: Some of it they just we never heard back from that. They just and then we also had to refund about five figures of of money back to folks who just wanted their money back. You know, Joe: Yeah. Simon: And what I recognize, I can either stay bitter or I can get better. And I was already working on some new things that I said are, let's hit the gas. Let's go. Joe: Yeah, yeah, I hear you, man. OK, here's another phrase that I heard in the in the audio book, Make a U-turn. I don't remember the context of it, but I'm hoping you do. Simon: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, so I'm sitting at the beach and on the way to the beach with my family because living here in Florida, we're really big beach people. And you know how you see a sign that says you're so many miles away from the destination? Well, I thought, hey, I know a better way how I'm going to get there. Well, I went almost 30 to 40 minutes in the wrong direction, so I had to make a U-turn to come back because my my my wife had said to me at the time, you know, you should turn there. And I'm like, no, I got, you know, typical guy, . All directions. Joe: , , . Simon: So clearly, I'm sitting up, sitting by the pool the next day and I got a little drink with a pink umbrella and it hits me what happens when a person is heading in a direction and they never make a U-turn and see what I say, U-turn. It's not just the letter U. It's YOU u turn. Because when you turn, that's when you notice all the opportunities and possibilities that were waiting for you to make a turn. But if you never make the turn, you can miss it. Joe: And it's so funny because I think having GPS now has saved a lot of arguments in cars with the guys because we're always , we'll go out of our way to just say, no, we didn't miss any turn. Fail forward... Simon: Yeah, you know, in the dictionary, failure comes before success, and I'll never forget I went to speak for the CEO Council of Tampa Bay, and during the debrief time, one of the executives said that he had he gets out of failure award every quarter. And the failure award is to encourage his team members to fail. And I happen to go back and talk to them again. And I said, do you still give out the failure award? He says, no, we changed it. We changed it to fail faster. And what he was saying is so many people walk on eggshells at work. They don't want to break out and do anything that's out of the norm because they want to play it safe. And real breakthroughs comes when you walk on the edge, when you do something that you haven't done before. That's where the breakthrough is. So failure comes before success. If you go to the dictionary, fail faster because failure is not a bad word. It's only feedback. And the quicker you fail, then you can quickly see what won't work. Listen, I have failed more times than I can count on both hands. ? But I can tell you those failures have informed some of the successes that we've experienced as well. Joe: Yeah, so it's too bad the word has such a bad connotation to it, because you're , it's just it's just a flare. It's just, hey, this this wasn't  or something didn't work. But instead, it makes you feel as if you're less of whatever you're trying to do, whether it's less of a human, less of a father, less of a business person, less of whatever. And it's too bad it has that that feeling or that label attached to it. Simon: Yes, Joe: You know, and Simon: Yes. Joe: Like you just worded it, it's it's you need those things in order to know if you didn't have those signals, how would you know that something was wrong or that you need to change? . Simon: Exactly. Joe: Ok, you're going to have to help me on this one because it's Chapter seven. And all I put was it's about today. I assume it's about the time we're living in. But I didn't put any more than that. Simon: Yes, so what I was really getting at about today is so many times we are future focused that we forget to be present in the moment today. And if we focus on today, tomorrow, it's going to take care of itself. But who we are today goes into our future, waits for us to get there and says, welcome, we've been waiting for you. So what are you doing today? Is this the highest and best use of your time today? Joe: Are you in your space  now with what's happening and the pivot's you're making, the changes you're making, how much different do you feel than you did when things were rocking and rolling in January of this year? Simon: Yeah, you know what, I have to be really, really real with you. I struggled for about a good thirty to forty five days when this first first of the year I was rocking and rolling. I was in my groove. I was great. Life was wonderful. I've been home since obviously March 13th. And for a few of the weeks, I just was down in the dumps. I was ticked off. I was like, oh my goodness, woe is me. What's this virtual thing? What, what, what, what, what. And then. And then I said, Wait a minute. Hello, buddy. You know, a little of your cooking, if Joe: The. Simon: Not a little bit. So I got up and I looked at my wounds and stopped crying  over spilled milk and all of the contracts that it cancelled and realized entrepreneurship is not easy. If it was easy, everybody would be doing it, Joe: A man, Simon: But. Joe: Gus. Simon: You know, you don't earn your stripes, entrepreneur, when you're on top of the mountain in the valley, when no one is coming to save Joe: . Simon: You, the phone is not ringing and you're looking at your bank account and say, I need to make a payroll. Joe: Yeah, Simon: And so we mentioned the IRS, Joe: Yeah, Simon: . It's a real brother. Joe: Yeah. Simon: It is real. And that's what I just said. OK, I've got a choice to make. First quarter got second, third quarter, it's going to look a little bit different, so I told our team we're not going to dial for dollars to try to get business. We're just going to love on people and help them understand that serving is the new selling. So who could we serve? So we just reached out to clients and say, hey, we'll do a free virtual whatever you need, bring your team. And I just started doing a ton of those. And it's so rewarding. And then almost counterintuitive, we started getting calls for business Joe: Yeah. Simon: And it's just like we weren't even setting out to do that, but it just happened. So, yeah. Joe: Yeah, and I was curious because, like I said, you never know what's going on behind the curtain with anybody, ? And you Simon: Yes. Joe: And I don't know each other that well, but there's something that just comes through the screen, comes through on the videos, definitely when I'm there in person with you. And to me, I would have been that person that had gotten down and I flowed  through. Like people were just like how people are calling me How, because I, I, I think we sent out probably over one hundred, ten, ninety nines for twenty nineteen because we have so many entertainers on our roster and it's literally everything across the board and they're all reaching out. How are you holding up. Because they knew everything dried up and I was like man and I know people think I'm nuts, but this was such a blessing for me because I just needed this time to do other things. And, and and I have I have not stopped with someone as positive as you. I wanted to just kind of get a feel for how does Simon T Bailey handle a situation like this to me? He'd be like, oh, we got this. And so I was just wondering if and and I appreciate you explaining that you aren't the superhero that I think you are, that you did have your moment, which is very human. But like you said, you you lick your wounds. You stood back up and said, OK, now it's time to get busy and stop crying. . Or whatever. Simon: And you know, when I came out of this fog, I realized I needed to start cooking, so I started cooking. I've learned how to cook a little bit enough to survive. I stop binge watching on on everything. That was all. I turn the TV off. I started reading. I started writing, I started thinking and I started doing Zoom calls, almost like as a mastermind with different people from different areas of business, just getting input insight. And all of a sudden I was like, OK, wow, OK, here's what we need to do. And once I got into the groove, because I love all things business and I love what I do, I just start seeing all the opportunity. You and I said, OK, we're going to have to come to this. But probably the most important and I would be remiss if I didn't say this COVID-19 and my my my prayers and heart goes out to all of those who've been directly impacted in either losing a loved one or have been impacted by it. But for me, it has been a time for me to get closer to my children. I've got a twenty one year old sophomore in college, Daniel, a daughter who graduated. She's the COVID-19 graduate, you know, graduated from high school to head the college. Interesting time of life. Two kids in college, ? So I'm like, OK, I'm writing checks  now. Joe: Oh. Simon: It's just like in school you go to school at seventeen thousand dollars a year. I'm like, oh, Joe: Oh, Simon: Like, Joe: Man. Simon: Yo. But here's what I did during this COVID-19 time. I hired both of them as my research assistants. So every Sunday night they have to read a book that I have purchased for the different books, business books. They have to listen to a podcast, listen to a YouTube video, watch or view an article, and then they have to write a summary and answer seven to nine questions. They have to turn it in by Thursday at five p.m. I pay about twenty dollars a day. They could take Friday off and we're already seven weeks into this. And it's all the things that Dad said you should know. Now I'm paying them to learn because it's actually research for another book that I'm working on, but it's probably closer to my children. This is your covid-19 time, so I'm just eating it up. Joe: That's awesome. Are they going to school there where you can see them? So they're going you're in Florida, ? You're Simon: Not in Florida, Joe: At. Simon: So so my son is online and my daughter, believe it or not, she's actually going to go to campus, the private school, private college, and she's going to their class ratio is maybe one professor to 20 students. So they're just going to practice physical distancing and she'll start in the fall. But I'm excited for them. But we've gotten closer Joe: Yeah, that's great. Simon: And so it's been good. Joe: Yeah, are your Simon: Yeah. Joe: Beaches open or closed? Simon: The beaches are open, you know, here in Florida, we we kind of march to the beat of a different drummer and we love our beaches. Joe: I don't blame you, I I grew up on the East Coast, so I'm from New York originally, so. Simon: Oh, Joe: Yeah, Simon: Yeah. Joe: I don't blame you. Brilliant versus average. Simon: So average living is dead, as we would say here in the south, that dog won't hunt. So the days of doing average work with an average attitude is gone um average people show up to collect a check. Brilliant people show up to add value. What I discovered after interviewing top performers, those who got promoted, who were promoted over time, they discovered that a paycheck is given to people who show up, but opportunities are given to people who work and think beyond what they're paid to do. That's a difference between average versus brilliant. Joe: So you can help me with this, because I I and I was there like I'm not I don't ever see these things as if I had all the answers. I'm fifty eight. I'm I'm a late bloomer, like, you know, I'm working Simon: Young Joe: Now. Simon: Man. Joe: Yeah. I'm working on this stuff as if I'm reinventing myself. And I feel like so many people get stuck in thinking they can't do things and I don't know where that comes from. I know it's fear is part of it, but there's got to be a way to say, listen, all the people that use you look up to or you see or you aspire to become or they all they all have to figure it out the same way we all put our pants on one leg at a time type thing. . So how is it to how do you try to get people to shift their their frame of mind to say, listen, you can do this just as much as anyone else. It just takes hard work. But other than that, some of these people are like lifelong learners, but they literally don't do anything . They take course after course, conference after conference, seminar after seminar or whatever, and they just don't do anything with it. Simon: You know, it's it really comes down to something so simple and not to be simplified, but there's a Yiddish proverb that says the only person that likes change is a wet baby. And what I've discovered, the reasons people don't go for it is because they don't want to change. So think about it. When you first learn to ride a bike, probably you fell, ? You perhaps started your business. You started had some success, but maybe experienced a little failure. It was a change that you had to make. Just look at this whole virtual world like everybody now understands Zoom. But when they first heard Zoom, you're like, no, no way. Or you could get changed. All of a sudden you're telling other people, did you know that you can go in the chat and you could do this? You could do that. So until people are willing to take just a little step, I don't have any entrepreneurs in my family. I'm the first one in my family to leave a nine to five and venture out into these uncharted waters. Why do I why did I do it? Well, first of all, it was a dream, but a dream until you put feet to it. And it's just something in the sky. You got to move every single day. And until people are really ready to change, they don't want it bad enough. You got to be hungry and go after it. Joe: Yeah, I guess that's just it, , it's not it's not even the fear, because if you want to bet enough, you'll push the fear aside. Simon: Anything you want, your first car, your first home, your first job, you become laser focus and you go after it. Joe: Well, this brings me to the last thing I had on my know, which was and this is perfect shift or be shifted, ? Simon: When you look at that work shift, shift, if we were to break that down, simply means see how I fit tomorrow, see how I fit tomorrow shift. That's the acronym. So if if I don't shift, see how I fit tomorrow, I will be shifted by everything in every one. So let's look at a prime example. How many malls are going to survive after this? COVID-19 malls are going to forever be changed. But guess what? If they don't adapt and come up with a new model, the Amazon of the world is literally going to shift and replace them. And if it's that simple, so everyone listening to us  now, they have to say, don't wait for the tap on the shoulder or the phone call with your boss. You shift before you shifted. So how do I begin to look at my workplace through a fresh lens if I'm an entrepreneur? Who are the top 20 percent in my field? What are they pivoting to? What are they doing? How do I begin to ask a different set of questions that allows me to shift before I'm shifted? Joe: Yeah, and that's , this is what we're talking about now, the Calvary is not coming . You have to shift, you have to do it on your own or you're going to be shifted for sure. And it might be wherever. Simon: Yes. Joe: Yeah. Is there anything else about the book you want to talk about before? I don't want to keep you we're just about at an hour. And I know you're a busy man. So is Simon: One Joe: There. Simon: Thing, there are exercises in the book that I encourage each person to go through, and also we have an online course called "Shift Your Brilliance" system that people can walk through to take their teams through it. And we've gotten rave rave reviews from people who've gone through the course, and it's at simontbailey.com. Joe: Awesome, so I'll put all of this stuff in the show notes for everybody so they'll have all the links. What is the best way to get in contact with you? Simon: Yeah, they just go to simontbailey.com, "T" for terrific, Joe: Exactly. Simon: As we really Joe: Love it. Simon: Got to. Joe: So my my middle initials, P. So I can't say P for perfect, because that's not going to fly. Simon: P for Powerful. Joe: There you go. OK. I like that, OK. Like I said, I'll put all of that in there. I can't thank you enough for doing this. I you know, I respect you so much. I love watching all your videos, Instagram stuff that pops up. So it's super inspiring to me. Someday if I can get my speaking act together, maybe I'll ask you for advice someday on how I get my first one and how I Simon: Oh. Joe: Can get to the point. And maybe we'll share a stage someday before I take a dirt nap or say. Simon: Thank you. Thank you so much. Joe: Thanks. Thanks a lot for coming on here again. I appreciate it from the bottom of my heart, I really appreciate your time. And it was an honor to speak with you. Simon: Thank you, Joe. Joe: Ok, man, you take care of yourself. Simon: Take care.

What Have You Changed Your Mind About? With Carol Lethaby, Dave Weller, Karin Xie, Matt Courtois, Paul Nation Simon Galloway - TranscriptTracy Yu: Hi, everyone.Ross Thorburn: Welcome to the podcast. This, as you probably noticed, is our third‑anniversary episode. To celebrate, we're doing a special long podcast, the longest one we've ever done. We've got six special guests for you, and all of them are going to answer the same question. That question is, "What have you changed your mind about?"Tracy: First, we've got Dave Weller and Simon Galloway. Dave currently works as an online diploma and TESOL tutor and blogs at barefootteflteacher.com. Simon runs his distance learning courses for teachers and managers. Both of them have been on our podcast multiple times before.Ross: The second up is Paul Nation, emeritus professor in the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Paul's one of the most influential writers and researchers in vocabulary acquisition in the world. You'll have heard him before in our second‑anniversary episode about reading last year.Tracy: The third is Matt Courtois, who currently works as an academic director in a young learner language school, and Karin Xie, who works as an academic manager at Trinity College London in China. You might remember Karin from our previous episode about applying learning, and Matt from episodes about observations, minimalism, and also teaching writing.Ross: In the fourth segment, we'll hear from Carol Lethaby, who's a teacher, a teacher trainer, and materials writer based in the US and Mexico. You might remember Carol from our episode about neuroscience. You can learn more from her on her website, www.clethaby.com.Tracy: Finally, Ross and myself will talk about what we have changed our minds about over the years.Ross: Great. Enjoy the podcast, the longest one ever.David Weller & Simon GallowayRoss: Dave Weller, Simon Galloway, you've both been involved in English education for what, 12, 15 years?Dave Weller: It's 15 years for me.Simon Galloway: Same, pretty much.Ross: What have you changed your mind about? There must be one thing, Dave.[laughter]Dave: You're talking about since the beginning of my teaching?Ross: It could be at any point at all.Dave: The biggest thing I've changed my mind about since I began ‑‑ for myself, and for students, trainees, and everything ‑‑ is I used to think in quite a fixed mindset. I used to think, "Well, some teachers are good, some teachers aren't. And some students are smart and some students are not."The more I do this the more I realize what it's really about. Attitude and effort are going to be the things that make the difference. It's a bit of a cliché because I know everyone starts to think that way these days. Is it a bit of a...Ross: I don't know. I think that's still true to an extent, isn't it? I'm not sure. I ultimately do think in those terms that, for trainees for example. You find some at the beginning of the course, and you probably think these guys are the stars, the A‑People, the B‑People, and the C‑People.I almost think that fixed mindset, growth mindset is one of those things that I know as a fact but I'm not sure the extent to which I'd genuinely apply it or really believe in it deep down. Have you seen courses where people who you thought they were the weakest people at the beginning, ended up becoming the strongest at the end?Dave: I don't think the courses long enough for that, but there are definitely teachers that start at about that level and end about that level because they're not really trying to grow. There are other people that actually use the effort.I can see that through my distance learning courses, too. There are some people that start with a pretty bad first assignment and by the end, they're way up here. There are other people that just...Ross: I think of people on diplomas that we run. We, for example, observe them at the beginning before they got on the course. Some people that we thought, "They're not good enough to get on the course." There was a big kerfuffle. Eventually, they got on the course and they did really well.I've also seen the opposite of people that we said, "Yep you'll have no problems on this course," and the people go on to fail.Dave: Yeah, and I wonder if actually what we're saying to them is even affecting that. If we tell them, "You're going to do great," then that actually fosters a fixed mindset in them.Simon: It goes back to what we were saying earlier about praising the effort. If you tell someone, "You'll have no problem in this course" you, in a way, set them up to fail. Maybe they won't put the effort in as much because they think they're intrinsically or naturally intelligent enough or they're already at that skill level ‑‑ they won't need to put as much effort ‑‑ and they struggle.Dave: It certainly happens with some people.Ross: It's almost like there's an unspoken assumption that these people are going to put in X amount of effort. That's the bit that doesn't get said. "You'll be fine. You're going to do really well in this course."Dave: Assuming that you spend 10 hours a week?Ross: Yeah, but a lot of people don't know. Dave, let me guess. You didn't used to believe in learning styles but now you do?[laughter]Dave: No, actually. I think that when I was a new teacher, perhaps one year or two years in, I was always so certain of everything. On my original course, I took everything as gospel. I held my opinions so strongly, and I was so sure about everything. I knew I had a lot to learn, but what I did already know, I was certain that this is just the way things are.Since then, I've changed my mind and been exposed to new ideas, new evidence. I've changed everything so many times over the years. I can't remember who said it, it was something like, "You have strong ideas, held lightly," something like that. The longer I'm in this industry, the more I fully agree with that.I fully believe in what I do and how I do it, but if you show me some evidence or a compelling study, or show me a different way of doing things, I'll willingly change and try something new. That willingness to change, I guess that's [inaudible 06:13] . My willingness to change and to be shown to be wrong, I actually welcome now.Ross: That sounds like a perfect description of the Dunning‑Kruger effect. After your cert course, you believed a hundred percent in everything, like it was the gospel. The more you learned, the less confident you've become in those things.Do you think there's a problem then in how we present information to trainees on cert courses? I always find that maybe it's at diploma level that we maybe encourage people to think critically about the things that are being shown to them. The emphasis on introductory courses is, "Here's what you need to just be OK in the classroom and survive your first year."Maybe we're giving people false confidence. Maybe the more effective learner autonomy, long‑term strategy to teach people is, "I'm going to show you these things, these principles, but you also need to be able to question them."Simon: That goes back to something I've said before. You can take it to the wider education industry as a whole. In the language class, should we even be teaching language? Should we just be teaching skills and applying motivation? If you give someone the motivation to learn and the skills to be able to do so independently, then they're inevitably going to be able to learn a language.It's the same with any course, almost. I think the days of the tutor being gatekeeper to information are long gone with the advent of the Internet. Sure, a curated course is much easier to work through step‑by‑step because you can trust the authority of the source. It's broken down and spoon‑fed to you in a certain way.I do think that, in most courses that we run, there is that lack of teaching meta‑skills at the beginning or teaching to think critically. I think every course assumes that a course before has done that, even going back to initial education from 5 to 18. It's something, I think, missing in that, but that's a much larger issue.Dave: Yeah, we assume that everyone's got a degree or whatever, so they must know this. Then the university course, "They must have learned it before."[laughter]Dave: At secondary school, "They must have learned this at primary school."Simon: They thought, "Oh, parents must have...Dave: "The parents must have taught them that."[laughter]Simon: It might make a flip‑side argument. We're saying this from a position of 10, 15 years in the industry. As a new teacher, I can still vividly remember going, "Just tell me what to do next. I just want to get through my next lesson. I want to survive."I think it is a responsibility for initial teacher training courses to be able to provide that to teachers, so they can go into the class with the confidence that the learners will probably learn something. If you just give them a bunch of meta‑skills to work with, and then throw them into a highly pressured environment, they're going to fall to pieces. They need to have something to fall back on.Ross: Maybe there's an advantage of the Dunning‑Kruger effect. If you know almost nothing and you're really confident in it, that will overcome your lack of skill. If you're a new teacher and you said, "I'm telling you all these things, but maybe they're true. Maybe they're not."You maybe go into the classroom, and you wouldn't have the confidence to make up for your lack of skills. Maybe that Dunning‑Kruger effect, maybe there is some benefit to having that and believing in something even when you don't know much about it ‑‑ as a new teacher.Dave: It is to some extent, but every time, just keep on reminding the trainees that they can make their own...Simon: "This is the best way to do something. Or is it?[laughter]Dave: Just keep on pushing for deeper questions, like, "Was that effective in your lesson today? How do you know that? What real evidence were you going on? I saw the student do this. Why do you think that was? Do you think the same thing would work in another class?"Simon: What's the point of life? Why are you here?[laughter]Simon: Yes. Is anything even worth it?Ross: It's interesting. There must be a point where it would become counter‑productive and you just end up with...[crosstalk]Dave: Yeah, there's in so much doubt.Simon: No, it's true. Again, as a good trainer or a good manager, you should be able to spot when your teachers are ready, if they're not been challenged. When I was at [inaudible 10:14] you could see teachers that are ready to be pushed to the next level. People reach plateaus, and you could see when somebody goes, "Well I know everything now."Ross: That's a good point.Simon: "Actually, you don't. [laughs] Let me introduce you to some new ideas, like differentiation in the classroom or some of the higher‑level teaching skills." They go, "Oh wow! I had no idea you could do this." When their ability to implement what they know reaches what they know, then that's the time to give them more knowledge so they then turn that knowledge into skill.Dave: I like this idea of that plateau. If someone's already on like a slope, you don't want to stick them on a much steeper slope just for the sake of it.[crosstalk]Dave: ...just pick a Sisyphean boulder something. But if you're on a plateau already, you've got to get them on the slope.Ross: If you've had a trainee at the beginning of the course who's really struggling to give instructions, and you're like, "OK, here's a three‑step way of doing it," tell them in simple language, model it, and then ask questions.Dave: Show them, tell them, ask them, give them, Ross.Ross: Right, but then you wouldn't want to do afterward, "Well, when would that not be effective?" Do you know what I mean? You're just trying to get that person to that basic level.Simon: When you're observing them, you wouldn't want to sidle up to them and, "Sorry, um, you know that, according to Vygotsky, that's actually [inaudible 11:27] what you shouldn't have really done that there. This kid's ZPD is way off.[laughter]Ross: That might be too much.Paul Nation Ross: Hi, Paul. Welcome back. You published your first paper on language teaching in about 1970. You've had a very long career as well as a fascinating one. Can you tell us what's one thing that you've changed your mind about during your time from being a teacher all the way up to the present?Paul Nation: First of all, I like to think I always got it right from the beginning, [laughs] but I guess the main change that has occurred to me is the idea of the roles of the teacher and how the role of the teacher as a teacher becomes an important role but not the major role of the teacher.I say there's four or five roles of the teacher, and I always forget one of them. You know the number one role is the planner. The number two role is the organizer of activities and opportunities to learn. The third role's something like the trainer who trains the learners in strategies to learn, vocabulary and strategies to deal with the language learning.The fourth role would be the teacher as the tester who's giving learners feedback about their progress and showing them how much vocab they know and so on. The fifth role is the teacher as the teacher who actually gets up in front of the class or guides them through an intensive reading passage or something like that.I think that those roles are sort of ranked in the order of planner, organizer, trainer, tester, and teacher. That probably would be the major change I've come to during my reading of research, doing research, and so on. On the other hand, I also have to say that just about every PhD student I've had, and I've had a lot, have proved me wrong about the topic that they were working with.That's virtually without exception, sometimes proved me spectacularly wrong. I remember, for example, Teresa Chung doing research on technical vocabulary. I'd said in the first edition of "Learning Vocabulary in Another Language" that technical vocabulary probably made up about 5 percent of the running words in text.When she did her research, she found it made between 20 and 30 percent of the running words in the text, which is quite a bit different, one word out three compared to one word out of twenty. [laughs] That was sort of major changes, once people have done the research, to say, "Wow! I think I'm going to step back and change my ideas about that."I would say that the biggest one is the idea of you need a balanced approach to vocabulary learning and you need to see that teaching is a part of that, but only a part of it. You've got to make sure that the others are there. I would've given a much greater role to teaching very early on in my career.Matt Courtois Ross: Matt, what's something that you have changed your mind about, and why did you change your mind?Matt Courtois: What haven't I changed my mind about?[laughter]Matt: Looking back to my first year in Korea compared to now, I don't think there's a single belief that I still have that I had then. The biggest underlying thing that has changed in me was, at first when I was a teacher, I kind of thought the more knowledge I had about the language I could acquire, the better teacher I would become.I actually don't think that's really necessary. Being able to discuss any grammar point at the drop of the hat to me is not what makes a good teacher anymore. Having some of the skills to draw that from people, to run a good activity, and to facilitate improvement is much more essential to being a teacher than just knowing the subject matter.Ross: Can you remember when you changed your mind about that? Was it a long process?[crosstalk]Matt: It was a really long process. I taught in Korea and Russia, and probably my first year within China, I looked at teaching language in this way. Within my first year of teaching at my last company, there's a job opening for a content developer, content writer, something like that.I remember I took one of my favorite grammar skills lessons ‑‑ I think it was about the passive voice ‑‑ and I submitted it to the manager of this department. He sent me back an email that was three pages full of criticisms. The most positive things he said were basically about some of the animations that I had in my PPT...[laughter]Matt: ...not about the content of this deep analysis of the passive voice. He was just saying, "The method in what you're doing it, it's not about the grammar itself. It's how you present it," and stuff like this. I think I improved so much when that manager sent me such a critical feedback.I started approaching teaching grammar from, "What context am I going to use?" rather than having this giant scope of understanding the passive voice, every tense in English, rather than looking at myself as somebody who analyzes language. That's not my job.So many English teachers talk about how being prescriptive is so bad, but they're teachers. That's what they're doing. They're not writing dictionaries. They're not contributing to the corpus. We're not describing the language here. We're taking what those guys have and then presenting it to students in a way that they can practice it.Once I got over that mindset that, "I'm holding the key to the language, and I'm the person who's defining the language," and said, "No, I'm coming up with situations and facilitating situations in which they can use it," I think I improved a lot as a teacher and a trainer.Karin XieKarin: Teachers used to just think, "Well, my English is good, so I can teach English," or "I'm not confident in teaching English because I'm not confident in my English." Language awareness, like your knowledge in phonology, lexis, and grammar, they are important and are very helpful. It's just the teaching skills, they are very important, and they should be emphasized more.Ross: You need both, don't you?Karin: Yeah.Ross: If you don't know any English and you're the best teacher in the world, you can't teach English. Equally, if you're amazing in English and you can't teach at all, that's not going to work, either. You need a bit of both. At some point, especially for lower levels, the knowledge of English becomes less important than the skill to put it across.Karin: Because I was trained in the CertTESOL, DipTESOL way, I always believed that I need to build the classes around the learners, and I need to train teachers a reflective coaching way. I believed that was more effective than any other ways.Recently, I just come to realize that not necessarily, and use that as good challenge or good chance for me to try out different things, or give people different options and see how things goes. It's not one way better than the others. It's just there are different ways of doing things.Ross: This is one of the dangers of just working in one environment for a very long time. You're often only exposed to one way of doing things. You get transposed to another place, and you automatically just assume, "Well this isn't the right way to do things. This is wrong. This isn't the most effective." But is that true? Is there any evidence?Karin: Exactly. I think all the things that I've tried out shaped how I do training and classes now. They're definitely not the same as when I was in the old environment for such a long time.Carol Lethaby Tracy: Hi CarolRoss: Hi Carol. I think you're very well known for integrating ideas from research into your practice. We'd love to hear from you about what was one of the most important or the most interesting things that you've changed your mind about over the years.Carol Lethaby: I think the example that came to mind here certainly was not using the mother tongue in the classroom. I did my PGCE in the UK in learning to teach French and German. This was mid‑'80s, and the communicative approach in foreign language teaching then had a big hold on the profession.We were explicitly taught not to use English at all when we were teaching French or teaching German. Of course, I carried this on when I started teaching English. I did my Delta and the same thing, it came up all along the way. I remember it seemed to go against my intuition, but as I know now, don't always rely on your intuitions, because they might not be right.I actually did some research into this as a part of my master's degree here in Mexico and found out that, when you ask learners, one of the things I asked them in a piece of research I did, was, "Do you want your teacher to have English as their first language? Do you want your teacher to be a native speaker of English?" a list of pedigrees.The one that came out top at all levels, especially at beginner level, was they don't care if their teacher is a native speaker. They want a teacher who can speak their first language, who knows their first language.It made me think about, "Why then are we telling people you don't need to speak the learners' first language, you don't need to know the learners' first language, and you don't use the learners' first language. It's better not to"? Obviously, I was reading the history of English language teaching, Phillipson's Linguistic Imperialism.You realize how this happened and how this idea was transmitted and perpetuated. Now, knowing more about the brain and how we learn, I really don't believe that. I am convinced that we need to use the learner's first language in order to teach them another language.Ross: How would that look like in the classroom then, Carol? Do you have any examples of what that might look like with a group of students?Carol: I remember trying to teach the difference between first and second conditionals when I was teaching the younger Mexicans in Guadalajara here. There was this explanation that I was trying to work with them with levels of probability. It depended if you were an optimist or a pessimist whether you would use the first conditional or the second conditional.How confusing that was and how unsatisfactory that was for a learner, I'm sure. Now I would just tell those learners, "This is how you say it. The first conditional corresponds to this in Spanish and the second conditional corresponds to this in Spanish."Spending ages trying to define a word or an expression when just a quick translation could really help in that case, using the learners' language for effective reasons.I remember I didn't speak a word of Spanish when I first arrived here. I was given beginner's classes precisely because it was the idea that this would be a genuine communication situation, etc. I couldn't get to know my students.It means I couldn't ask them, "How are things going? How are you getting on in these certain situations?" Or, "What things are worrying you about learning English? Don't worry about this [inaudible 23:43] . It just means this. I can help you with this later."All these kinds of things that really enhanced language learning, I wasn't able to do because the idea was that we couldn't speak each other's language and only think in monolingual situations. It's just ridiculous not to take into account and use the learner's mother tongue.Ross Thorburn & Tracy Yu Ross: We heard there from a bunch of our favorite guests over the last couple of years about things that they have changed their minds about. Tracy, to finish the podcast, what have you changed your mind about?Tracy: There are a lot of things I have changed over the last few years. One thing is how I can connect on education‑related either theories or practice and into what I'm doing, my work in context. In the past, I remember when I started being a trainer, I read a lot of books about teaching, training, and theories in ESL, TESL, exactly related to this industry.Then, I realized maybe I just focused too specific to this industry, to this area. When I listened to podcasts and watch TV, or read other books, magazines, or journals, sometimes I realize that actually something that relates to this industry could really help what I'm doing. I need to give you an example, right?Ross: Give us an example, yeah.Tracy: I read a book about how marriage works. The book is "The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work." When I started reading this book, I didn't expect any connection to work, but the more I read about it, I realize actually there were a lot of principles [laughs] can apply to work, to manage a team.For example, there's one thing mentioned about criticism versus complaint. You can see the difference between these two. You can say...Ross: What's the difference? Do you want to give us an example of each?Tracy: A complaint, you can say, "Oh, you didn't do this very well," or "You didn't complete this on time," for example, at work. Criticism, it's like, "Oh, you always did this this way. You're not able to do this," something like that.Ross: It sounds like more you're talking about the person rather than the actions that they've taken or not taken.Tracy: Yeah. Of course, people can complain. You can give constructive feedback to the other person. You can talk about the facts, you can talk about the behavior, but you don't jump into conclusion and say, "Oh, this person is not able to," or "This is always like this." You're not giving the person another chance to reflect and then to make things better.When you're working with colleagues or you're managing a team, it's really important to distinguish the difference between a complaint and a criticism. Another thing is super, super useful, when I had a difficult conversation or tried to give feedback to our staff, just try not to have a harsh start‑up when you're having a conversation.Even though before you start a conversation, you knew it's probably towards some kind of a conflict or uncomfortable situation, still try to avoid a harsh start‑up in a conversation. Maybe you want to ask this person how they feel, what's going on, and what happened, and find out more information.Then provide more specific information to the person. Then give the feedback and then action plan, rather than at the beginning is said something very negative. It's difficult for the person to receive your feedback.For you, Ross, you work in different roles for the last 12, 13 years. You were a civil engineer, and then you work in education. Anything that you've changed over the last few years?Ross: Something I'm in the process of changing my mind about is a lot of the things that we talk about here and we do on teacher training courses in materials design and management is we concentrate so much on what goes on in the classroom as that's where the learning and everything takes place. That's fundamentally the most important thing.I used to believe that, but I'm coming to believe more that what happens in the classroom might not be the most important part of their learning process. What might actually be more important is what happens before the class and what happens after the class.I found a nice quote yesterday from someone called Ausubel, hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. He says, "If I were to block out and reduce all of education's psychology to just one principle, I would say this. The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Ascertain this and teach them accordingly."That was really cool. How much time do we ever spend actually finding out what students already know? I would guess, generally, not very much time or not a lot of time. Certainly, on this podcast, we don't talk about that very much.I think the same thing for what happens after class. We tend to assume that things finish once the students walk out the door. We know from memory curves and things, if students don't revise what they've already learned, then they forget the vast majority of things that happen in classroom.That's something I've changed my mind about. I think we need to spend more time focusing on what happens outside the classroom every bit as much, if not more, compared to what happens inside the classroom.Tracy: How can you do that then, to find out more information before the class about the students?Ross: I don't have all the answers to it, but I think it's more important that we think, like ascertaining what students already know before lessons, finding out what problems do they have, and designing our lessons to try and solve specific issues that students have.What normally what happens is students get placed in a certain level. Then they just work through a course book, which roughly approximates what they know and what they don't know.We don't go into enough effort to find out what are the holes and the gaps, or the peaks and the troughs, in students' current ability and knowledge, and try and smooth over the troughs, to make sure what we're doing in class fills those in.Tracy: Have you ever seen any examples or some teachers who were able to focus on what happened before the class or after the class?Ross: Some things, like the whole flipped classroom principle, goes towards that. Some educational technology works towards aiming to find out what students know before the class. It has them answering questions and makes sure that they reach a level of mastery before they move on to the next topic.I don't think that's the norm in most scenarios. It's something that we don't talk about enough, and I think those things are every bit is important probably as what goes on in the classroom and deserve our attention a lot.Everyone, I hope that was interesting. I presume for a lot of people that the reason that you're listening to this podcast in the first place is so that we can change your minds about some issues that are important. Hopefully, it was useful hearing how some of our favorite guests have changed their minds about different things over the years.Tracy: Thanks very much for listening.Ross: For the last three years, thank you. Good‑bye.Tracy: Bye.

Cognitive biases screw up our thinking. They make us make bad decisions, come to wrong wrong conclusions and for the most part we're completely unaware of them.Ross: Hi everyone.Tracy: Today we've got our special guest, Simon Galloway.Simon: Hello everyone.Tracy: Simon, do you want to...Both: ...introduce yourself?Simon: I'm mostly working with Trinity Diploma in TESOL, and Certificate in TESOL at the moment.Ross: You've done a bunch of other stuff before that, right? You were teaching in Japan, in China?Simon: Yes. I taught in Japan. I taught in China for several years. I was a director of studies and production...Ross: Regional manager as well?Simon: Regional manager for a while, yes.Ross: I remember years ago, Simon, watching you do a workshop for managers about how to do performance reviews. One of the things you spoke about was cognitive biases, right?Simon: Yes. That was focused on performance management, and all the things that managers tend to overlook when they're gauging the performance of their teachers. They might think they're giving a completely objective viewpoint, but actually these cognitive biases affect the way that they think.Ross: They don't just screw up managers thinking, they screw up everybody's.Simon: They screwed up everybody's thinking, yes.Ross: Screws up yours so much you brought a book about cognitive bias for your train journey on the way to Beijing.Simon: I did. It was quite good. It's "The Art of Thinking Clearly," by Rolf Dobelli. It's an international best‑seller.[laughter]Simon: I guess many of the people listening have also read this.[laughter]Ross: For those people that haven't heard of cognitive biases before, or don't have Rolf Dobelli's book, what's a cognitive bias?Simon: This is something that affects the way that we think and prevents us from thinking clearly, but we're probably not aware of it. As soon as we became aware of it, we gain a power over, or a power to stop it. It's usually something that we're not so aware of.Ross: Awesome. I guess over the next, whatever it is, 13 and a half minutes, we're going to try and give everyone a bit more power over their own thinking by talking about three things. First of all, cognitive biases for teachers.Tracy: Cognitive biases for trainers.Simon: And cognitive biases for managers.[background music]COGNITIVE BIASES FOR TEACHERSRoss: In terms of why cognitive biases are really incredibly important, here's a little quote from one of my favorite podcasts, which is Joe Rogan. He is interviewing, on this, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and they're talking about cognitive biases.Neil deGrasse Tyson: There should be a course called "Cognitive Bias 101". Forget college. Every high school should have a course "Cognitive Bias." The entire course should be about all the ways we fool ourselves, if we are going to emerge as adults no longer susceptible to charlatans, going forward.Joe: Yeah. We're thinking about just giving people facts instead of teaching them how to manage your mind.Neil: Yeah. Your head is your vessel, into which you pour information. Nowhere, and at no time, are we trained how to turn a fact into knowledge, knowledge into wisdom, and wisdom into insight.Ross: An example of a cognitive bias, confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is when we have our assumptions about something.Simon: Sure. Yeah.Ross: We ignore evidence to the contrary, and only listen to evidence that supports what we already think, right?Simon: Yeah. I see this a lot with teachers reflecting on their lessons. You ask them at the end, "How do you feel about your lesson?" They'll say, "Yeah, I feel really good about it. I saw this and this and this."As an observer, I'm like, "I didn't see any of that." Then I try to second‑guess myself, then. I'm like, "Maybe I missed something," but I think, really, a lot of this is that the teacher knows what they're looking for.Ross: And ignores what students didn't say.Simon: Yeah, ignores what it didn't say, exactly. That's the key about confirmation bias, is that they only look for evidence that confirms their viewpoint. They don't look for any of the conflict in evidence.Tracy: You know, they call hot or cold cognition or something? I think the hot one is definitely influenced by the people's emotion and motivation, and the cold one doesn't have much emotion involved in it.Ross: I wonder if this then affects you also in that same situation that Simon just mentioned, where just after a lesson it's more like hot cognition, so you still feel emotionally attached to the lesson, but maybe days or weeks afterward you feel less like that.Simon: Somebody's TP journal should be more objective, right?Tracy: Yeah, yeah.Ross: You'd think so, right?Simon: You'd hope, wouldn't you?Ross: After you'd had time to...Another one I'd read about before, I think it's called fundamental attribution error, or fundamental attribution bias.Simon: Attribution error, yes.Ross: This is where, if you make a mistake, you do something bad, you say it's because of the situation. But if you see other people doing the same thing, you put it down to their personality.The classic example is, you're driving down the road and you're speeding because you're late for work and you go, "I'm only speeding because I'm late for work." Then you see someone else speeding past you the next day and you think, "Oh, that person is such a reckless driver," and you ignore the fact that maybe the reason that they're speeding is because they might also be late for work.I thought this was applicable for teachers, because maybe you teach a class and it goes very well and you think, "Oh, I taught such an awesome class. That was fantastic. I'm such a legend."Then you have the opposite experience doing a class and it was just utterly awful. You go, "Why? Well, the students weren't motivated, the students weren't interested in the topic, the students were at the wrong level." You make all these excuses about why it didn't go well, based on other people rather than based on yourself.Simon: Yeah. You've got to look at it more objectively. You've got to realize that the environment has a much bigger effect than you might immediately think, right?Ross: Yeah.Tracy: How can people realize that they are experiencing the cognitive bias? How can they prevent to have the bias?Ross: I think a part of it is just knowing that they exist, right?Simon: Yeah, I think so. Just knowing that these are ways that we think is a big first step to fixing them.[background music]COGNATIVE BIASES FOR TRAINERSRoss: Should we also talk about the trainers? What are some of the biases that you think we can fall prey to?Simon: I was thinking here about trainers observing lessons. I thought of a few things here. The first one is regression to the mean and anchoring. Two different biases here, if we're actually formally assessing candidates or teachers.With regression to the mean, it's this sense that, you can watch a teacher. Maybe they did a really bad lesson. You think, "I'm going to give a load of advice and all these tips." Then in the next lesson, they do much better. You think, "Well, I'm an amazing trainer."[laughter]Simon: "I've just changed their whole outlook on teaching. Really successful." Sometimes a teacher might do a really good lesson. You tell them, "That was amazing. That was really awesome."Then the next lesson, they do much worse. You think, "Huh, praising obviously didn't help this candidate. Obviously, if I give too much praise, the candidate gets complacent and they do worse." But in reality, perhaps in both of these cases, they're just regressing to the mean.Ross: They're just going back towards the norm.Simon: They're just going back towards the norm, right? Because there's a kind of a standard‑ish lesson, which might be just a pass, or that kind of thing. If the candidates are not amazingly proficient, or else not amazingly bad, they're going to tend to regress there, regardless of the trainer's feedback.Then of course, based on a fundamental attribution bias, we tend to think, "Oh, we're the trainer. We're changing their lives. We are the big changing point."Ross: Right. Yeah. "I have this huge influence over this teacher."Simon: "I can have a massive influence, a massive impact on these teachers," when in reality there's so many other factors affecting the quality of the lesson.Ross: Almost sounds like the over‑confidence bias, as well. Like my five minutes of feedback has completely affected this person for the next week.Simon: Changed their lives, yeah.Ross: Then anchoring is where, for example, you have an expectation of where the limits are on something, and you don't want to go move too far beyond that, right?Simon: Yeah. Sometimes in my experience, I've had cases where the trainer before me has observed a teacher and told me, "This teacher is amazing. See what you think about them." Or "Oh my goodness, that teacher was awful. See what you think about them."Then when I go in to watch them, got that in my mind. I'm thinking "OK. This teacher, I don't think they're that good, but yeah, that was quite good," so I give them quite a high mark. I give them a higher mark than I would have otherwise. Or I think, "That teacher wasn't great. Yeah, OK, the last trainer was right," and I give them a lower mark. But actually...Ross: Are you really looking at it objectively?Simon: Am I really looking at it objectively, right. If I hadn't had that piece of information from the other trainer, I may have given them a different mark, regardless.Ross: I'd read about this with Donald Trump speaking about, for example, immigrants to America and saying, "We're going to deport all illegal immigrants," and that's the sort of anchor for the conversation. The one extreme end.Simon: Yeah. Pushing it to the very extreme, yeah.Ross: Yeah. You're then framing the conversation as, "That's how far I'm willing to go." Then things move back from there.Simon: Yes, exactly. In that way, Trump changed the whole narrative of how things were talked about in America.Ross: Yeah.Simon: Marine Le Pen did the same in France. With Trump, somehow, he actually managed to get into power, but say you were Marine Le Pen in France. Even though she didn't get into power, she changed the narrative in France towards a more right wing bias, through anchoring.Tracy: I think there's something also related to the outcome bias. Another example, people probably got A for their TP lesson and they thought, "Everything I did for this lesson worked perfectly," and they kept using the same thing for the next TPs. But actually it didn't work very well for another group of learners.They didn't really realize or identify what worked and what didn't work, and just go in depth and reflect on what exactly students reacted, to the materials and the teacher's behavior. They just looked at the outcome because "I got an A."Ross: There was another interesting example about cognitive bias in a book called "Black Box Thinking" that I read about, which is prisoners going up for parole. The main thing which decided whether they got parole or not was whether it was the morning or the afternoon.Simon: Yeah, right.Ross: If it was after the judges had just eaten lunch, there was a high chance that prisoners will be allowed parole, and if it was in the morning when they didn't, then they wouldn't.Simon: Yes.Ross: This relates to trainers because...Simon: Yes, yes, absolutely. This is how we first got onto talking about the subject.Ross: Yeah.Simon: I did quite a lot of analysis on trainer observations on a teacher‑training course. After doing quite a thorough analysis, it was quite clear that the trainers gave much better marks in the morning than they did in the afternoon.It seems that the trainers were not taking a lot of time to eat lunch. They were often missing lunch, or they were just having a coffee for lunch, or this kind of thing. The result was that the afternoon lessons were 5 or 10 percent lower marks than the morning sessions.Ross: Yeah.Simon: To the point where significantly more afternoon sessions were actually failing than the morning sessions.Ross: What I think is fascinating about this is obviously taking a class and passing or failing it in a teacher‑training course is much lower stakes than getting released from prison.In those examples from capital punishment or from parole, no one was aware that those things were going on until someone actually collected the data. I suppose the takeaway here is, looking at the plain numbers and seeing what story numbers can tell us, as trainers.[background music]COGNATIVE BIASES FOR MANAGERSRoss: I remember years ago having a new teacher who I was training. I think they came in late, and they were dressed too casually. They didn't impress me in training.When I was talking to my boss about it, saying,"Should I pass on this feedback to this person's manager?" he said, "Beware of the self‑fulfilling prophecy," which is, you pass that information on and that the new manager hears that this teacher has turned up late and they wore the wrong clothes.They then start to look out for all those attributes in that person, and it very quickly turns into that person ends up getting fired, but maybe they didn't actually have to.Simon: There was a very interesting study done on this. They took a class of primary school students. They just took five students at complete random and said to the teacher, "Look, these students have been identified as very high potential." They took another five at random and said, "These five, you're going to have some problems with these students. Just find a way to deal with them."They came back a year later they saw the students that they had chosen at random as high performers actually had much higher results.Ross: I thought the take away from that was...Simon: Belief in those children can really make the big difference.Ross: Presumably, having higher expectations of the students is the key there. Tell us more about the performance management, and some of those biases for managers. How do those operate?Simon: If you're rating teacher's performance, as a manager, you can be prone to a lot of different biases. I was doing this kind of performance appraisals for teachers for a long time, and I realized that I was quite prone to a lot of these biases.[laughter]Simon: A lot of new managers, and even experienced managers, will make the same mistakes. As I've said before, when you realize that you're doing it, that's the first step towards changing it.On a rating of one to three for a lot of areas, you might just think, "Well, all right. They're not too terrible and they're not amazing at this, so I'll just give them a two." And you just give them twos.Ross: Two out of three is?Simon: There's a one, a two, and a three. One is below expectations, two, meets expectations, and three, exceeds expectations. Then, what the teacher gets is just a whole lot of twos.I've seen teachers also evaluate themselves this way. It's like, "Can you self‑evaluate?" I had a teacher before. I gave them some time to fill out their self evaluation. They took about 30 or 40 minutes all together. Finally, when they gave it to me, it was a line of twos, the whole way down.[laughter]Simon: There's that one. Then there's the other ones, where you can look at a halo bias, where you've got a teacher that you think, "This is my star teacher in my team. They're great," so you just give them a three for everything.I had a center director before who did this. Every single teacher that she liked in the school, she would just give them all threes. Then there was a teacher that she didn't like, gave them all ones. It's like the opposite of that, saying that if somebody is good, then everything is good.[background music]Ross: We talked a lot there about things that can go wrong. What could people do to get around those problems, to be less cognitively biased?Simon: As I've said before, I think just by knowing what will happen, you can start to stop it. With all learning, you can start by noticing and then turn it into action. If you know what these biases are, you notice yourself doing them, kind of stop yourself.Tracy: Thanks for listening everybody. Thanks, Simon, for coming to our podcast today.Simon: My pleasure.Tracy: Bye.Ross: Bye everyone.Simon: Bye‑bye.[background music]Tracy: For more podcasts, videos, and blogs, visit our website...Both: www.tefltraininginstitute.com.Ross: If you've got a question or a topic you'd like us to discuss, leave us a comment.Tracy: And if you want to keep up to date with our latest content, add us on WeChat at tefltraininginstitute.Ross: If you enjoy our podcast, please rate us on iTunes.

www.unitybodymot.org Video Narrator: If you’re an experienced personal trainer, fitness or movement professional, the chances are you chose your profession because you love the buzz of helping your clients maximize their potential. But it is important to stay ahead of the game by constantly expanding your knowledge by learning new skills, if you don’t your competition will, leaving you playing catch up. So don’t get left behind, with Unity Body MOT you can build your existing skills – not simply the latest fitness fads or equipment but in the very latest information and skills to help you and your clients be more successful. We’ll help you learn the relationship between exercise, movement and injury using the very latest science and research. How and why common exercises and movements are not right for many individuals and advise the right exercises to the right people at the right time. Understand how the majority of tightness mobility injury and other issues occur, what you can do about this, and learn how to relay this new information to clients in plain English; keeping them healthier and happier with their bodies and with you. You will learn precisely how your client’s body is working on the inside so you can help them in a much bigger way than before. These are the skills essential to stay ahead in the game and set you apart as an exceptional fitness, movement or exercise professional. And of course, it gives you the edge when it comes to retaining existing customers and attracting new ones. If you’re serious about your profession and your clients, never stop learning. Contact Unity Body MOT to learn more today for a totally free strategy call to discuss your specific situation and how together we can help elevate your career to another level. Hi there and thank you for joining us for a series of informative, and we hope, useful podcasts for everything a wellness professional needs to know to ensure that their clients are receiving the best training possible, and therefore allowing the trainer to be more successful by having more happy clients. My name’s Chris Dabbs, and as always, I am joined by Simon Wellsted – founder of Unity Body MOT. Hi Simon, how are you? I hope you’re well. Simon: I am good Chris, thank you. Chris: Fantastic, okay. Well really what we’re going to be trying to do today is to acquaint you with what Unity Body MOT are up to and how Unity Body MOT can help you to increase your business. So our podcast is aimed at helping wellness professionals become better acquainted with how to help their clients more by helping them to train effectively while understanding that their clients will gain more when their exercise routines are tailored to meet their clients goals. While taking into account how injuries or infirmities can affect the outcomes. I know that’s a bit long winded Simon but does that sound about right? Simon: Yeah that sounds great. Thanks Chris, that’s a good summary. Chris: Okay. So really looking through your website and watching the video, which of course we heard as an intro at the beginning of the podcast, tell me something about how you would explain this to me if I was a wellness professional looking at helping my clients to become, well, fitter I suppose. Simon: Okay, so I start this by normally saying that a given client will be given a certain set of exercises for a given objective, and those exercises might be fairly typical for a range of clients. But what we are now beginning to understand is that certain exercises are going to be right for some, neither right nor wrong for others and definitely wrong for quite a few. And we reckon that that quite a few is probably 50-60%. Chris: Really? So you’re saying that more than half of the people, potentially, are doing exercises that are what? Injurious or will injure them? Simon: Down the line, potentially, yes. We use the phrase ‘laying the foundations for injury’. So they may not have any symptoms today, they may be perfectly correct, they may have no mobility issues, they may not have any obvious tightness; but what we do know is that if there are things going on inside the body, which we teach PTs about and the PT can find those, they can then make changes to their exercise program to get around those so that the client moves forward faster. Chris. Okay. So you mentioned changes or things going on inside the body perhaps, would the client be aware of these things or is this something that…? Give me an example, if I wanted to do some upper body exercises to try and get rid of my belly, how would your program help my trainer – my PT – to help me to, I guess, achieve my goals? Simon: Okay, so just taking a little bit of a step back, one of the key learning points from the training that we do with personal trainers and other fitness and movement professionals is to say that what they can see and what their clients can see and the information that the client gives back to the trainer can often give a misleading picture of actually what is going on. Chris: Okay. Simon: So they may say, “I’ve got really tight hamstrings”. And one of the key learning points at the very beginning of our training is to say just because somebody has got really tight hamstrings doesn’t mean that you have to work them – stretch them, mobilize them – that tightness of those hamstrings might be coming from somewhere completely different in the body. So we use the phrase ‘a robust and sustainable solution’, if you’re working with somebody and you are giving them exercises and their achieving the objectives in the timeframe that you would expect them to be achieved – fantastic. If they keep on coming back to you week after week and they’ve regressed, and the same problem is appearing, then that’s a really strong indicator that something else is getting in the way – somewhere else in the body is causing that issue – so just progressing with doing that exercise faster, harder, more frequently isn’t necessarily the right answer. Chris: Right. So, okay if something was ringing a bell for me in terms of, what are they called, you know the insoles that you can buy that are specially tailored to your feet? Orthotics or something like that. Simon: Yes, orthotics. Chris: Orthotics. The reason for providing that is because your feet can affect your gait and your stance and how you stand and therefore you can develop back problems or shoulder pain or something like that. So that’s kind of what you’re saying, obviously not to do with orthotics, but that’s kind of what you’re saying. In other words, there may be an issue arising from somewhere else within the body that prevents the exercise from achieving its simplistic goal of, as you were saying with hamstrings, of really sort of loosening up the hamstrings. Simon: Correct. We’re living in a press-button society, everybody wants a quick result for health or any other area of our lives. So people see that they’ve got an issue so people tend to focus on where that issue is. Orthotics is a wonderful example, I’ve done training for podiatrists and demonstrated that we can completely change the biomechanics of the foot by working on the shoulder. Chris: Alright, really? Simon: And that’s not as a manual therapist, that’s as a PT working on the shoulder. So just putting in an orthotic for a runner because they are seen to have a particular gait characteristic, putting in an orthotic to stop that characteristic isn’t necessarily the right answer. And we actually take PT’s through a process – a very simple, quick and safe process – where they can make those determinations for themselves, not just from a ‘should they have an orthotic?’ because obviously PTs are not qualified to put orthotics in. But they are qualified to help somebody achieve mobility through their hamstrings or mobility through their spine, whether that be upper or lower body. Chris: Yeah, I see what you mean because what you are saying is basically, if someone has a pain in their shoulder that could potentially affect their gait because they’re trying to compensate for that pain in the shoulder. Simon: Absolutely. Chris: Whereas the orthotic would mean that they don’t walk in that particular way. What they are doing is transferring, potentially, the issue somewhere else and creating a new one as well as keeping the pain in the shoulder. Simon: You’ve hit the nail on the head there; it’s creating new ones as well. When we’ve run training for podiatrists we’ve demonstrated, actually using them as models, that they’d come out and screen somebody’s foot and reported back to the audience what they found because their foot specialists. We’ve just then told them how to do something very simple on the shoulder from an exercise perspective, then told them to go back and rescreen the foot, and everything’s changed. So sometimes orthotics are required, but for very good medical reasons, sometimes they’re not. What we’re saying is that we can make a very, very good determination as a fitness and health and movement professional whether somebody should be working on their hamstrings, whether they should be squatting, whether they should be moving their spine in a particular way, whether they should be doing upper body extension of their arms in a particular way and we can then say, if the case in a particular client is no they shouldn’t, they’d know that. They can steer clear of those exercises, but also we teach them how to solve that problem as well, from an exercise perspective. Chris: Okay. Is there a simple way to explain to us how the PT, you know the personal trainer or the wellness professional, can actually find a way to work with that client to overcome it? Is it as simple as a manual manipulation of the shoulder? Simon: Yes, we’re not talking about manipulation here, because obviously personal trainers are not typically qualified to put their hands on people in a manual way – that’s a therapy. We’re not crossing over to therapy. Chris: That makes sense. Simon: Yeah, we’re not crossing over the therapy threshold, if you like. Chris: Well no because obviously the osteopaths and all of those people in that world are trained in being able to do that and obviously they need to be able to work alongside professionals. Would that be about right? Simon: Absolutely. What we’re talking about here is a client who doesn’t necessarily have any obvious issues. We use the term asymptomatic; they don’t have any pain, they don’t have any mobility issues that they are aware of, they’re not injured – because a personal trainer, and as they add additional qualifications to their own skills set, they won’t have the insurance to treat that injury. Chris: No, or the training of course. Simon: Indeed. However, we know that if we can help the PT identify that somebody, for example, has a high risk of a knee problem, and that is very simple they can determine that in about ten minutes… Chris: Well that’s my next question. Simon: Absolutely, then certainly for the foreseeable future, that PT should not be recommending that they go on a treadmill or go through exercises which put heavy forces down through the knee. We also teach them how to solve that problem through other exercise options. So they’re achieving the same objectives but not actually putting high pressures through the knee because that particular client has a predisposition to a knee problem and we can determine that and say what the risk is of that person sustaining a knee problem which is relatively new science. So it’s all about doing what’s right for the client, not saying, “Don’t exercise, go and lay down because you can’t exercise.” It’s saying, “Exercise is important but let’s exercise, for you, in this way because you have a, for example, predisposition to a knee problem or back problem” – whatever that might be. We will still exercise but we’ll just do these exercises which don’t exacerbate that particular issue that you have. It may not be painful now but, and then this is the difficulty that we have, in that people don’t understand that they have a predisposition to an injury. Chris: Well exactly there Simon, I mean that’s the thing, if you go and see a personal trainer and you’re undertaking a training regime you may not realize, as you’ve said, that you have an issue with a knee/back problem or anything else. Are you saying that the PT can actually spot that because of compensation or compensatory movements or something? Simon: We give the PT a toolset, a very simple toolset which takes no more than ten minutes to do once their competent at it, and they will be able to pick out whether somebody has a predisposition to a knee problem, whether they have a back problem, whether they have a predisposition to upper body shoulder issues and if those markers are in place then the exercise professional then has a choice: they can say, “Okay I know that, that is really useful information”, educate the client about it which is absolutely crucial, in plain English. Chris: Right, I think more importantly the plain English, exactly. Otherwise you’re potentially giving some bad news to somebody – I don’t know. Simon: Right, it’s got to be all delivered in a positive way. So the way our personal trainers that we train tend to work is to do these tests, they then say to the client, “Well, we know your objectives are to lose weight, to get fitter for running…” or whatever it might be, “because of what I’ve checked on your body, this is the right exercise set for you.” And if the client turns around and says, “Well what about going on a treadmill?” for example, they might turn around and say, “Well actually, at the moment you have a high marker that say you shouldn’t really be putting forces through your knee so we will train you in a different way.” Chris: Okay. So give us an idea of these markers that the trainer would be able to employ, or to identify I guess. I’m thinking it’s something it’s something along the lines of exercising and perhaps there being a perfect range of movement within a joint and then if the client can’t achieve that then that that’s an indicator, or is that too simplistic? Simon: It’s part of the solution. In our training courses we actually teach that there’s two types of biomechanics, and without getting too technical; there is biomechanics from the outside – what we can see – but most people’s view of biomechanics is photographic athletes with little balls on them and watching the angles of their body and various other forces that are acting on the outside. Chris: Yeah I have seen that. Simon: That’s called extrinsic biomechanics. What we are talking about is what is happening on the inside, we can now apply those same principles to various soft tissues of the body. And of course you can’t see those, they are hidden by our skin and our body, you can’t see for example how the hamstrings are pulling and whether their pulling in the right direction. Chris: Well no, exactly. Simon: But we give the trainers the ability to work that out through very simple tests that they do. Yes they have to put the client in particular positions and do certain movements with them that are designed to pick up those markers. And we’re looking at the soft tissues in the body, and that’s everything from joints, muscles, nerves and all the other soft tissue things that are inside our body. And we’re just picking up what we now understand as being markers which give a high degree of certainty that that person should really not be doing that type of movement at this particular point in time. Simon: That’s interesting because of course what that would mean, if you think about it, say I go to the gym and I decide I am going to take on a personal trainer to help me, I would be looking at a plethora of choice really, maybe five, six, seven or eight personal trainers who within that particular gym, and how do I choose? I think that’s one question, if you haven’t been referred to a personal trainer, it is difficult isn’t it? You know I wouldn’t know. So recently, in January of course like with most people – they go to the gym at the beginning of the year, I’m looking at the PTs and I’m thinking, “Okay, that one looks a bit young, that one looks a bit old, that one doesn’t look like they know what they’re doing etc.” so I end up choosing just one guy who seemed okay and who spoke to me in a respectful way. Now I suppose if there’s a way that personal trainers can differentiate themselves in that sort of marketplace because really if you look at it from an economic point of view, someone is making a big investment to become a personal trainer, it is something the love to do and they need it to pay for their own lifestyle don’t they? Effectively it is their job so this is like putting up a new offering, a new service, a new shop front; something to differentiate themselves from their peers who they’re also working with so that they get more business. Is that right? Simon: Absolutely, it’s a very crowded market, the fitness and exercise market. You’ve got personal trainers, you’ve got fitness instructors… Simon: They are different, they have different qualifications. And you’ve got group exercise people as well – Pilates and yoga and other types of exercise. And as with all businesses it is crucial to find unique selling point, something which you can say to your clients which is basically going to give them a hands-up that says, “Hi I’m here, I can do something different, I can actually make sure that the exercise program that I’m giving you is right for your body – tailored for you!” And that is a massive differentiator, it makes them stand out from the crowd, allows them to charge more for their services. Chris: I suppose it would do wouldn’t it? Well yeah if you’re better trained and you’re an expert in something, then yeah you have to charge more for the services. And of course you will keep your clients longer because they are going to be even happier with the results. Simon: Absolutely, I mean the crucial thing is that the client is happy. If the client can get to their objectives quicker, more safely but still achieve the objectives they want to achieve – that’s’ a big tick. If the personal trainer or the exercise professional that their working with can give them some useful information about their body and how their body’s working… Chris: Especially if they didn’t know anything about it is the first place. Simon: Absolutely. So help them in their daily lives especially if they’re, as is very common, somebody who is sitting at a desk behind their PC or driving a lot, then they can give that information. Just like they do currently with nutritional advice, it’s the whole package and this is just a new tick in the box to say, “I can give you a tailored exercise program for your body because I will be able to tell you which exercises are right for you today, which ones are perhaps not so correct for you today,” and if the personal trainer’s got the right mindset, some do some don’t and that is absolutely fine, they can either steer them in the direction of other exercises or use exercises, which they are the professional in, to actually help correct the markers. We can get rid of these markers and that’s crucial. Chris: Well yeah I understand. Again going back to the shoulder, it’s about making sure that the shoulder issue is sorted out through exercise and all that sort of thing. Well that makes a lot of sense Simon and really I’m getting exciting just learning about this. I think when I go to the gym next I’m going to be asking whether or not the exercises that I’ve prescribed are the correct ones. Should I be spending ten minutes on the cross trainer if I have an issue with my hip? Is it a good idea? Simon: Absolutely. I think that’s a perfectly valid question and people are getting more knowledgeable about their own bodies in a whole series of ways. When they go to see the doctor they will typically ask what these drugs or what this intervention is designed to do. When you go to find a personal trainer or any exercise professional, whether it be pilates/yoga, in a gym or a sports coach, it’s really good to ask those questions and get answers back from that professional say, “yes, your body is right for this.” And that’s really where we are now, we have this ability to get this knowledge out there as widely as possible so that the fitness and exercise industry can really be proactive in giving their clients the best exercise program for their objectives and their body. Chris: Okay fantastic. Well I think that what we’ve got now is a real opportunity for PTs, or any wellness professional really, that is involved in mobility or exercise or training or anything like that to really benefit and grow their business whilst helping their clients. So I think that in our future podcasts what we’ll be doing is looking at various tips and tricks that people can learn and actually use with their clients so that they can help them to move forward quickly. And Simon you don’t mind giving those tricks and tips to people do you? Simon: No we can give out a few. Chris: I think it’s a really good, think people will absolutely love that. And then of course, at the end of the day, what makes more sense is that Unity Body MOT offer a full one to one training system that you can either subscribe to and come along and Simon will help you with that so that you can learn a about how your clients work. You want to tell us a little bit about that? Simon: Yes. Our differentiator is that we look to provide training that fits in with the professional’s lifestyle and business. We put on public training courses; we run both a one day and a two day workshop but we also, and actually what I do more of, is the fitness professional will contact me and say, “Love this material, want to learn it. I simply don’t have the time to go on a two day training course, can you come to my gym and train me at my location or can I come to see you?” And I’ll do that and we’ll work out a package, and that can be on a one to one basis or a small group basis. The key part here, if we do that the personal trainers own premises, they can bring clients in. And they learn, obviously the client has got to be okay with this, but they learn with a real client so they can learn the skills and we can be helping a client at the same time. It instills the knowledge more quickly, they haven’t got to go away for a weekend and learn the stuff and then come back to their workplace and think, “Okay, how on earth do I implement this?” Chris: Exactly, so that’s the way you go on training and then you hope you’re going to remember it when you put it into practice, whereas if you have a live client with you – wow! Simon: Absolutely. And then what they do is they join a learning community. We’ve got a secret Facebook group where people who have been on the training are members and the idea then is that they can join that community and ask questions. Chris: And that’s so vital because that’s the thing, people are in isolation more and more and especially, if you think about it, if one out of the ten PTs at a particular gym is on the Unity Body MOT program there is no one that they can discuss it with so you feel very lonely, isolated and all of that knowledge potentially goes to waste. I love that Facebook thing that is brilliant. Simon: And we’re hoping to run other courses around the country as widely as we possibly can but also what I want to do is to put on what I’m calling masterminds, so that once or twice a year we’ll grab a room – at a gym if somebody wants to host it that’s great – or at a hotel or some other venue, people who’ve been on the training can come and collaborate through that. And they can bring case studies if they want, we can do some refresher work, we can answer their questions and we can give them an update because this knowledge is not static, it changes all the time and it is crucial that we give them up to date information. So if something has changed or we’ve got a greater understanding of something that we taught them, we’ll give that information on the mastermind so they’re cons